Advertising dollars are rapidly moving away from newspaper, magazine, television and other traditional forms of advertising to interactive advertising, most notably interactive advertising on the Internet. In that space hundreds of millions of web sites compete for viewership, by providing content or functionality of interest to their respective audiences. Typically the sites receive income not by direct payment from advertisers, but from third party sources (Google™, Yahoo!™, etc) that channel ads to the websites, and revenue share with the websites on the basis of click-throughs. Advertisers typically pay for click-throughs according to prices determined by an auction system.
The above-described system leaves individual web sites with relatively limited options as to increasing advertising revenue. They can to try to draw additional viewers to their sites, or increase viewing residence time, by improving the content or functionality of the web pages, and they can provide additional space for advertising on the pages. But those goals work at cross-purposes. Improving content usually means providing less advertising space, and visa-versa.
There has been some discussion in the patent literature regarding use of personal profiles and personas to improve web searching. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/166,926 entitled “Dynamic Search Processor” addresses that topic, as did its priority documents provisional applications 60/583,294 filed Jun. 25, 2004 and 60/593,034 filed Jul. 30, 2004. These and all other referenced patents and applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in a reference, which is incorporated by reference herein is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
But those documents did not squarely address how persona searching could help web sites to improve revenue derived from 3rd party advertising on their sites.